I’ve taken on this insane habit lately of waking up at 7:30 in the mornings. This is nothing of my own accord, at least not entirely.
I find myself picking up on the atmosphere we create more and more these days as I struggle to pull myself out of a strange whirlpool of stress.
Every Saturday morning for all of autumn of 1999, with peepers in my eyes and a white cotton turtleneck under my jersey, I arrived at the elementary school gymnasium to run the wrong way down the carpeted court and touch the kiddie-sized basketball once all season. With a gusto that could be called respectable but not impressive, I supported my team with my shiny white Keds and my impeccable, parentally-enforced attendance record.
Somewhere, sometime, in the back corner of my brain, I made the promise to myself I was only ever going to drop the word “home” in reference to one place. There’s a white house with a gravel drive and quasi-green grass on a corner lot in Richmond. That dandelion speckled plot, my friends, is hallowed ground. That’s home.
There comes a point in every girl’s life when she realizes she is no longer current. For many women, this point comes when their children begin to pepper conversation with unfamiliar acronyms. For others, it comes when they realize they spout out certain phrases with the exact intonation as their mothers.
I am not traditionally one to call myself superstitious, but my reflections have been making me suspicious as I consider that 2013 was perhaps the crappiest — for lack of a more appropriate term — year of my life to date.
To quote our nation’s most revered nightrider (pun intended): “The turkeys are coming!” Well, no, those may not have been Paul’s words verbatim.
Ah yes, U.Va. — where we have our cake and eat it too. We work hard AND we play hard. Sleep is for the weary, which we are not.
Every morning, my mom swishes her slippers across the floor, wearing the flannel bathrobe that is half of a matching set, given to her and my father as a wedding gift.
This time last year, I was in a complete first-year slump. I spent my first round of midterms treading in deep water, straining to keep my chin above the surface.
